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JOHN DAWKINS may want to send Julie Bishop and Kevin Rudd to the
naughty corner for copying his plans for a national school
curriculum. During his term as the federal minister for education
in the Hawke government, Mr Dawkins worked towards developing a
similar plan.

And while the minister and the Opposition Leader squabble about
who should take credit for the idea, they still haven't explained
how they are going to make it work. Nor have they learnt any
lessons from the failed Dawkins experiment, the main one being that
without the support and co-operation of the states the idea is dead
in the water.

It is no easy task. NSW and Queensland are among those that
continue to dig in their heels, jealously guarding control over
their existing curriculum standards, which they fear could be
lowered within a national framework. They are only too happy to
co-operate in the national push, just as long as standards are
raised to meet theirs.

Barry McGaw, the architect of the NSW Higher School Certificate
in its present form, introduced in 2000, supports the idea of a
national curriculum. "It won't work if there is some kind of
central office in Canberra that tries to prescribe it all," he
says. "It will only work if you keep the states on side."

The founding president of the NSW Board of Studies, John
Lambert, pulled the pin on the Dawkins plan for a national
curriculum during the early 1990s. Interestingly, Mr Lambert, who
now works as a full-time consultant for the Sydney Anglican Schools
Corporation, is singing a different tune.

Mr Lambert withdrew his support from the model discussed from
the late 1980s to the early 1990s because he believed it was
impractical for teachers to implement the high level of detail it
demanded. "There were too many outcomes that teachers were expected
to meet," he recalls. "The issue at the moment is a different
one."

Both the Government and the Opposition are talking about a
national curriculum in terms of common outcomes and probably common
content. "I am quite supportive of that. I think it is time that we
had a national curriculum that identified common outcomes, common
content and common skills," he says.

Education experts, the teaching profession and both sides of
government agree national consistency in needed, with 80,000
families moving from state to state and school to school each year.
There is also a push to lift education standards around the
country.

When the Federal Government announced its plans in October for a
national certificate of education - to replace the existing state
and territory year 12 leaving certificates - it released a report
from the Australian Council for Educational Research.

The report by the council's chief executive officer, Geoff
Masters, identified unnecessary duplication and differences in
assessment between the states.

Professor Masters found the curriculums for chemistry, physics
and advanced maths were very similar. For example, the states and
territories shared 95 per cent of the chemistry course, 85 per cent
of physics and 90 per cent of advanced mathematics.

While the maths curriculum was found to be largely common, the
method of assessment differed. In accounting, a mark of 85 in one
state did not represent the same level in another. This made it
impossible for employers to compare a mark gained in one state with
that in another state. And when it came to subjects such as
Australian history, less than half the content was in common; in
English it was about a quarter.

"There was fairly good agreement on skills, but little agreement
on the type of English texts or particular periods of history that
were studied," Professor Masters says.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, and Ms Bishop have been
critical of the content of English and history courses around the
country, insisting that history be taught as a stand-alone subject,
as it is in NSW.

SCEGGS Darlinghurst earned a special gong for daring to
incorporate feminist and race readings of Shakespeare's
Othello into its syllabus, despite the central characters
being a feisty female and a black foreigner.

While NSW English teachers argue their syllabus is of high
quality, with an emphasis on a personal reading of the classics,
Western Australia's syllabus has been more difficult to defend. The
WA Premier, Alan Carpenter, was forced to dump his education
minister, Ljiljanna Ravlich, after a series of gaffes she made,
including her failed introduction of a system of "outcomes-based"
courses into years 11 and 12.

History courses were criticised for their lack of rigour,
English students were reportedly asked to study posters and SMS
messages, and music students were not required to play
instruments.

Ms Bishop points out that the Queensland Government's decision
to exempt selective schools from the official State Government
curriculum so that students at these schools will study the
International Baccalaureate, is a clear admission that the Beattie
Government "has no faith in the quality of its curriculum".

Declaring an obvious bias, Mr Lambert says that "as founding
president of the NSW Board of Studies from 1990 to 1994, I would
say the NSW certificate is the best one".

"The HSC is an outstanding credential with international
recognition and will get students entering just about any
university in the world," he says. "It has also been very well
tested in the sense that it has been around many years and has been
through many revisions and has been refined so that it works very
well.

"Given that it seems we will have a national curriculum, because
the Coalition and Opposition have said they both want it, the NSW
HSC should be held up as the model on whatever is decided on. I
think NSW should take the initiative in making it happen."

Ms Bishop doesn't rule out lifting national standards to match
those in NSW, but the state shouldn't be so sure that it has best
practice for all subjects.

Her spokesman said that if NSW was so sure it had the best
system, it should put its cards on the table and allow an
independent body to judge its merits against its other
counterparts. That way, the best of what each state has to offer
can be included in a gold-standard curriculum.

The NSW Minister for Education, Carmel Tebbutt, has been
consistent in her wariness of the national proposal, regardless of
whether it is being spouted from the Coalition or federal
Labor.

She says NSW is one of the only states to have an external exam
for its year 12 certificate and to make the study of English
compulsory. "NSW HSC students are required as a minimum to spend 65
per cent more time in the classroom than their Victorian peers -
that's an extra 520 hours of face-to-face teaching time," she
says.

"In NSW the minimum requirement for tertiary entry courses
includes 200 hours more classroom time than is the case in
Victoria. And unlike the situation in some states, including
Victoria, NSW students must successfully complete the School
Certificate [or year 10] before being allowed to commence the HSC."
Ms Tebbutt also insists that practising teachers should be
represented on any national curriculum board.

Ms Bishop says it would be appropriate for any national
curriculum development organisation to include teachers as
representatives of the profession.

The president of the NSW Teachers Federation, Maree O'Halloran,
says the NSW Board of Studies includes representatives from the
independent schools and public school teacher unions.

"That way ensures you have the practising teachers on the board
and that they reflect more than their own viewpoint," she says.

But Mr Rudd has made a point of excluding teacher union
representatives on his plan for a new national curriculum board,
charged with designing common content in maths, English, history
and science as soon as 2010.

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